


The Structure of a Breakdown

by startwithsparks



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Bullying, Drug Addiction, Gen, Homophobia, Nihilism, Sexual Assault, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2011-08-06
Updated: 2011-08-06
Packaged: 2017-10-22 06:51:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,421
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/235098
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/startwithsparks/pseuds/startwithsparks
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's a scar, it's faint these days, that sweeps along the side of Sherlock's neck. No one's ever asked about it before now</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Structure of a Breakdown

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [this prompt](http://sherlockbbc-fic.livejournal.com/6487.html?thread=31153751#t31153751) on the [sherlockbbc-fic](http://sherlockbbc-fic.livejournal.com/) kink meme

Sherlock was what they called in those days a "difficult child". There were times when he seemed to have zero concern at all for others around him and times when he was so overwhelmed by every little sound and motion that the stimuli would send him into violent episodes (that's what the doctors called them, Father simply said they were tantrums and locked him in his room until he was over it). They had all sorts of medications and treatments for him, all of which seemed to work for a time before they ceased to have any effect at all on the boy; drugs, therapy, shock treatments all utterly failed to correct this abnormality in behavior and the Holmeses were at a loss for what to do. It had even been suggested by one doctor who Mummy called a "hippie, new-age quack" that they simply let him to what scattered and fluctuating interest he had to pacify him.

When Sherlock was left to his own devices he could be inordinately destructive. His little experiments had caused Father to go prematurely grey and Mummy would sometimes clutch her chest in a pang of anxiety that she blew far out of proportion. And when he was not nicking chemicals from his school lab or dissecting small animals, he was locked in his room with a pile of books, completely unaware of the world outside of those walls. It wasn't proper for a boy his age to act in such a way. Worse was that the boy, when he did deign to speak to others, tended to take on an scathing, over-critical tone and seemed to not understand why the people he spoke to got upset with him.

So at the age of fifteen, Mummy and Father sent him off to a boarding school in Germany. It was the sort of place where strict discipline and higher than average expectations were the norm and, most importantly, where parents didn't have to take responsibility for tending to their child's behavior. Best of all, it was far from England and the Holmeses could tell whatever lie they needed to when their society friends asked how their youngest son was doing and, instead, dote on Mycroft who had just gotten a lofty position with the government.

Sherlock shared a room with three other boys who were just as cruel to him as the boys at his school in England had been. He was long and lean, more than a bit feminine, and while he hadn't yet grown into the positive descriptives that would be applied to him later in life, these boys never failed to find plenty of words for him. Their favorite, aside from simply calling him a faggot was, _der Schwanzlutscher_. It wasn't the slurs that bothered him as much as the fact that the teasing was unrelenting. He wanted nothing more to just fade into the background and go unseen than to speak out and be sent somewhere even worse than this. And when he did fight back with what few skills he had at his disposal - namely a sharp wit and a keen observational skill - it only ended with him stifling a bloody nose or black eye or, on an occasion or two, worse for his troubles. The more Sherlock tried to not be seen at all, the worse the torment became.

Holidays were hardly a reprieve at all from it. No matter what he was doing or how well he was doing it, he was always the failure because he wasn't doing as well as Mycroft. His brother had gone to the best private schools, to Oxford, had friends with prestigious names and Sherlock was a exile from his own family, scraping by in the only place left that would put up with his erratic behavior. Somewhere along the way his parents had decided that he was irreversibly disturbed and given up on trying to help him be any better. Now they were just keeping him at arm's length, hiding him away when they could and treating him coldly, indifferently when they couldn't. He wasn't the child that they wanted so, when they weren't pointing out to him how burdened they were by his mere presence, he was simply treated like another piece of furniture cluttering the large family estate. By the time he was sixteen he no longer felt any desire for affection and accepted the fact that what little attention he would get would always be negative. There was, of course, a strong desire to prove them all wrong... but he was bogged down by the weight of expectation, the anxiety of trying to make himself better than everyone else while the world constantly reminded him that he was a freak, damaged, _wrong_.

Upon his return from break, Sherlock set about trying to find the thing about himself that would set him apart from everyone else. He barricaded himself in with even more books and poured over them, tossing aside the ones that didn't interest him at all and obsessively hoarding the ones that did - charting the patterns in the subject matters that naturally stimulated his mind. He stopped eating almost entirely at this point, nicking a sandwich or something once or twice a week when the pain in his stomach started to make it impossible to think instead of liberating his mind from the chains of average behavior. He only slept when he passed out, his book in hand, and this quickly became the largest detriment to his goal. For one morning, he paused his meticulous search in favor of another - finding any way to rid his body of the desire for sleep.

Finding the answer was easy, finding what he needed in order to carry through with it was not. But there was a boy who was charming and a fair deal more intelligent than the other boys, in his last year there and rather favorably regarded by other students. Sherlock had seen him tucking little packets into the boys' pockets before wrapping his hand around a wad of bills in return and slinking back off in the other direction. There were others who would deal out of the bathroom or tuck rolled joints away behind the dormitories, but none of them had what he needed. He couldn't tell looking at the boy himself, but rather the others who came to them - some of them wide-eyed, some of them with shaking limbs and desperate fingers, all of them weaker humans than Sherlock considered himself for their self-committed slavery to the drug.

He cornered the older boy quite abruptly one afternoon, his hands shoved deep into his trouser pockets and an intense look on his severe, almost ethereal face. He quite plainly laid out what he wanted and why he wanted it, only to be smirked at and told to come to a room later that night and he would be shown everything he needed to know. The promise of getting what he wanted was enough for Sherlock to ignore it when the older boy stepped close enough to him to touch and cocked his head suggestively to the side.

He had never been to this side of the dormitories before, but Sherlock made his way there with determination in his step and the knowledge that he wouldn't be seen by anyone on the way there. He was tugged inside the room, sat down and presented with a thin leather case that held a length of rubber tubing and a pair of needles. Tucked in the other side was a little packet like he'd so often seen distributed by his impromptu teacher. The boy took him by the arms, chest against his back, tying off the vein and guiding the needle expertly into his vein the first time. That was all it took. The sudden hit to his system was a rush too exquisite to turn his back on. It was an expensive habit to maintain, the words ghosted over his ear from the other boy's lips. But Sherlock had a bit of money stashed away and surely it would get him through for a while.

For months his life settled into a new routine, filled with classes backing up against his own private pursuit of knowledge. In his mind it was slowly becoming not just an attempt to be the best possible man he could be, but to be better than that - to surpass man and be almost god-like in his abilities, even if they were extraordinarily narrow. Anything that didn't fit with this plan was forcibly forgotten to make room for what would assist him in it. He started to think himself greater than he was and then, slowly, trickling into place, the actual abilities followed ego. He pulled away from people even more and eventually the teasing he had experienced at the hands of the other boys either stopped entirely or simply failed to register to him. There was only one thing his obsessive mind could process and while some of his class scores slipped, others crept above and beyond the expectations of a boy his age rather quickly. As long as he had a vein he could tap into, he could continue this trail on the way to being more than human; a topic that had fascinated him when he briefly read about them in his philosophy classes, but one that he was now quite certain he was attaining. The unceasing pursuit of knowledge was the key to the Übermacht and Sherlock could feel it right in his grip.

But greatness always had a foil and for Sherlock it was money. He wrote to his brother, very carefully explaining new experiments he was doing and the desire to continue them after school and it would be a great asset to him if he could acquire a benefactor out of someone who had always been there to console him after Mummy had one of her fits. It gave him a bit more than his allowance, though he had to ration out what Mycroft did eventually send to him. And while it wasn't enough, he thought that he had been such a dutiful customer, if here merely explained the situation to his dealer, the older boy would understand and work out some kind of deal with him. So in plain terms he set out his request and in equally as plain terms, the other boy told him what he was going to have to do to make up the difference.

In the moment his brain tried to determine whether the means could justify the ends for him, his decision was made for him. The needle burned in his forearm, but the high made his heart beat stronger than it had in days and caused the slight tremor in one hand to subside. After that he was too wound up in the rush to fight the other boy off when he was pressed down into the mattress and stripped, turned over and held down, brutally thrust into with unrelenting force behind every movement leveled against him. Sherlock didn't fight back and would never properly know whether he could have or not.

Days dragged on after that, the smell of the mattress under him and the pain in his lower back and gut haunting him every moment he paused for thought. Slowly, little by little, it eclipsed his work and became an obsession in itself, every detail mentally ripped apart and examined until Sherlock couldn't pull a breath of air into his lungs without feeling like his stomach was turning itself inside-out, spilling acid into this throat and dragging him to the ground where he curled his knees to his chest and wrapped lanky-thin limbs around them in an attempt to disappear completely out of the world. He had flown too high, his mind screeched at him, and he had fallen as dramatically as Icarus. His obsession with power, with being superhuman in his abilities had been thwarted by ego and pride and now he was staring into the ugly face of failure once again. There would always be something to stand between him and what he desired above all else. There was no point in him continuing to struggle against the tides of fate when, now, he knew that it would only end in a rough plummet back to the earth.

Sherlock was never one to settle on being average; the thought alone made him feel ill. In the dark despair that this fall from grace had dragged him into, he saw only two choices ahead of him: greatness in life or greatness in death. With one path clearly struck out, he had no choice but to accept the other. In his drug-addled mind it all seemed perfectly reasonable. He would do one thing perfect, one thing right in his life and it would be ending it.

He thought for some days about the right way to do it. Poison was the most logical way and he had a steady supply of drugs at his disposal to utilize as well. But after further investigation, he determined that there was no way to guarantee success with that. Too little and he would be sick and probably institutionalized for being insane. Too much and his system would utterly reject it and he'd find himself in a pool of his own vomit - he could suffocate on it, yes, but there was nothing grand about dying in such a manner. There was also the fact that many drugs and poisons took too long to metabolize to a fatal dosage and particularly in this place, there was always the chance that someone could walk in on him. Guns were too gruesome and he didn't really like them anyway. Cutting a vein or an artery was too painful and, again, took too long to come to completion. He finally decided that if he was going to do this there was only one way - to hang himself. It was all mathematics and anatomical knowledge. He could come up with an exact figure for how high off the ground he would need to be with his weight for his neck to break. He felt nothing either way about the choice, he was just resigned to the fact that the decision was made.

It took him one afternoon of very intense investigation to find the right place to do it and another afternoon to find the rope he planned to use. It was a little thinner than he wanted, but it would do. Everything was prepared with precision and attention to detail, down to the clothes he wore. Perhaps he had a flare for the dramatic, but if he was going to die he would be found looking as well as a corpse possibly could. Sherlock climbed up on the box he'd acquired for this purpose, pushed his curls out of his face and slipped the noose over his head. He felt a momentary pang of remorse that there was no one there to hear his final words, but he said them anyway: "A man is not truly brave who is afraid either to seem or to be, when it suits him, a coward." With that, Sherlock took a breath and kicked the box out from under his feet.

All went white then faded to nothing.

He couldn't say how long he was there, but logic told him it could only be a matter of minutes - no more than seven - before the rope was cut and his body laid on the floor. He didn't expect there to be blood, he didn't expect the rope to cut, but these were all things that he was told had happened when he came to early the next morning.

It wasn't a teacher or a fellow student sitting next to him, not even his parents, but rather his brother who sat on the chair next to his bed in an expensive suit with his head in one hand while he dozed briefly in and out. Sherlock's head ached and his mouth was dry. When he started to swallow, a blinding pain shot through his neck up into his head and down into his chest. But his attempt to whine at the pain only brought more with it. Speaking was an excruciating effort as well. So he laid there with his eyes open, watching his brother nod off as his neck throbbed under a wad of bandages. Mycroft did wake, though, and he said nothing - but he sat on the edge of Sherlock's bed and held his hand and looked, in flickers of moments that disappeared as suddenly as they appeared, honestly remorseful for something that Sherlock couldn't quite piece together. He didn't understand, he never had understood, why people felt the things they did at the moments they felt him.

Sherlock didn't stay at the school, but he also didn't go back to the family estate. For several weeks he was kept in a clinic to detox, with his brother by his side, calling out orders to doctors and making sure his brother had the best care the English government could pay for. After that, Mycroft kept him tucked in a little country cabin for the remainder of his recovery, with books and a chemistry lab and everything he needed to finish his education in quiet solitude. He sometimes overheard conversations between Father and Mycroft about whether or not they were going to send Sherlock to a hospital for "treatment". He was only a handful of weeks shy of being eighteen and it didn't matter what they decided, he wouldn't let them send him away again - he wouldn't let them send him to another institution, another doctor, to be poked and prodded at and questioned. He wasn't going to allow it anymore. He had defeated death and that was a greater accomplishment than any man could measure - if he could do that much, maybe he could overcome the wall that stood between him and his goal; or, at the very least, indulge it in what it wanted from him in the process.

*

Sherlock had left the door of the bathroom open again while he shaved, long neck arched elegantly and his lower lip held between his teeth as though it would help stretch out the skin. The razor swept easily over his skin in precise strokes, then clinked against the basin of the sink as Sherlock rinsed it off, tapped the water free and went up for another easy stroke. John honestly couldn't remember what he had even walked in there to ask now, he was so struck with what he was staring at.

The man was always done up in stiff collars and tight scarves. Even his dressing gowns rose high around his throat. Now he was standing shirtless at the mirror and John wasn't sure whether he should stare at the way his lean body all uncovered revealed the sort of firm muscles that athletes had, the little round pocked scars that ran along his forearms or the thin white scar that cut across the side of this throat. His hands gripped the doorframe on either side and eventually his eyes settled on Sherlock's neck, unable to drag away

"Ask," Sherlock said, the sound a low, concentrated rumble that took John a minute to decipher as an actual word.

John blinked and shifted uncomfortably, leaning against the doorframe so he was looking at Sherlock's face in the mirror and could see his own reflection there as well - looking stupidly obvious. "The scar on your neck?" he asked, not wanting to be insensitive - but Sherlock had invited him to ask and surely he knew what John had been staring at. "How did you get it."

Sherlock glanced down as he rinsed off the razor again and tilted his head in the other direction so the scar was hid in the natural creases of his neck. "Hanged," he said simply. "Or attempted to."

He didn't ask, he didn't have to. John had thought the same thoughts too many times since coming back from Afghanistan to even keep track of them anymore. Instead, he let his sympathy show in his eyes and stepped forward into the bathroom, picking up a thin white towel off a rack next to the sink and wiping an errant bit of shaving cream from behind Sherlock's ear before he turned and went back to their sitting room - still no idea what he'd gone back there to ask.


End file.
